Friday, March 24, 2017

- Fun With Shooting Statistics

I couldn't help myself. In the same way that people always slow down to see a car wreck, I found myself watching the movie "Miss Sloan", a 'chick-porn' gun control-gasm from last year about a lobbyist taking down the dreaded 'gun-lobby'. It was a stupid film, making a stupid point, and I'm glad it did poorly in the box office. In the age of Trump's America, we're sick to death of being preached to by our liberal masters, and I never cared much for the ever dour Jessica Chastain.

But using the logic of the gun control lobby, I thought I'd have a little fun with the numbers they cite in the film.

For instance, in 2015 according to ceasefire USA, a group dedicated to stating the gun numbers at their worst, there were 40,105 deaths and injuries related to guns in America. There were roughly 300 million guns in America in 2015, but that's too generous. Instead let's make the numbers slightly worse by using the number of gun owners, which in 2015 was estimated by Ceasfire at 100 million. Assuming that each gun owner was only responsible for s single shooting that resulted in injury or death, that means that 0.04% of all gun owners were involved in a shooting resulting in death or injury in that year.

You got that? 0.04%. Four one hundredths of a percent. Not a big number, but it adds up in a big country. This is the 'public nightmare of the epidemic of gun violence'. Now let's use that same math in another way.

According the census bureau and the FBI universal crime report, in 2015 there were 151,626 violent crimes where the perpetrator was black. Taken from a population total of 37,685,848, and again assuming that each crime was committed by a single unique person, the violent crime rate among blacks in 2015 was 0.402%.

Again, that's not a big number, but it adds up in a big country. And by coincidence it's also perishingly close to ten times the percentage of gun owners, who could be said to be involved in an injury or death, using the exact same method, by one of the media 'go to' groups on shootings.

Is that clear? Using the identically oversimple method used to talk about the 'horror of gun violence' in America, the black violent crime rate is nearly 10 times worse.

This doesn't teach you anything really. All these numbers are meaningless. In truth, violent crime for any race is almost always a crime committed by young men, who make up no more than 25% of the population, and many are repeat offenders. Only a tiny minority of the black population is ever involved in a violent crime, and elderly blacks and black women are almost never involved except as victims.

By the same token, gun owners are sometimes involved in multiple deaths or injuries, and many of the actual shootings involve other criminality where the gun was not legally purchased or owned. So to simplify the numbers this way doesn't lead to truth, it leads to distortion of the truth.

For reasons that I hope will become clear in a few weeks, this issue has been very much on my mind lately.

So the only real lesson you can take from this is that you should never trust agenda driven 'statistics' - especially from liberals who are notoriously innumerate. But I thought it might be useful to highlight one of the ways we're all consistently lied to by Hollywood and the left.